Physics and it’s not so popular language

Physics has gone under a big revolution since many years updating its theories from time to time. There are not only experimental evidences to follow but also philosophical debates to pass through. Every new and wonderful theory of physics has always been debated of its implications and methodology. These theories are even discarded sometimes due to philosophical reasons and come-up with new explanations. There have been many such incidents regarding Quantum Mechanics, but still being one of the most wonderful theories. The road the physics has taken is very much wonderful in its sense.

Let’s take a look at part of such a journey. For that we have start from the beginning forgetting all the laws we know for a while.

A New Beginning

Suppose there is a book kept on the table in front of you, when you look at it, it does nothing. When you push, it starts moving and when you stop pushing it, it stops moving. So you can say you’ve discovered something. Aristotle did the same and concluded that there is a natural state of everything i.e. to be motionless. When you apply a force on it, it comes out of its natural state and starts moving, when you remove the force, it comes back to its natural state i.e. at rest. Congratulations, You’ve discovered a law that governs the motion of object and anything you see.

If you’re brave enough to think, you might come up with metaphysics that “for every motion, there is a mover” i.e. if you see something moving that means there is something moving it, then there should be something that is moving previous mover. If you trace the chain of moving and mover you might come to an ultimate unmoved mover i.e. God.

We know today that the laws of physics don’t work this way that this principle of “cause and effect” is not true.

               From years, there has been a philosophical tradition of having the basic understanding of things, that there is a deeper understanding of physics which states that “everything happens for a reason.” There is a cause for everything i.e. if you see something moving that is because something else is moving it. This is not a statement out of air, this is what we call “Principal of sufficient reason.” It states that nothing is random, there is a reason for everything.

There are two statements regarding this

1. This is not right
2. Despite the fact that we know it is not right, we haven’t abandoned it.

We haven’t abandoned it, we’ve been using this language form ages. We know that the more fundamental laws governing the nature have been identified but we’ve stuck to this language.

There might be several reasons behind this, but one of the main reason is because it works very well with the regular domain of observing the things (might not work well at the fundamental level).

Lets Find Out Then

               Everyone might be aware of Wile E. Coyote and the road runner show. In almost every episode, this character runs off a cliff, but it doesn’t fall down. If doesn’t fall down until it looks down and realizes that it is off the cliff. This is what we call “The law of cartoon physics.”

We are all such characters, we’re all such because we have adapted to the fundamental language of Aristotle i.e. every moving object has a mover. Physics says that Aristotle was wrong, but our conscience says that he was right. He was right because he had an accurate way of explaining the things i.e. “cause and effect” are accurate ways of explaining the things at our usual domain. We know that when we stop pushing the book, it stops moving and that’s true.

               But after many years, there was this person (Ibn Sina) who was not convinced with Aristotle’s natural motion idea. He said that this thing is true for a book kept on the table, but if you imagine it doing the same experiment in space where there is nothing else, this book would continue to move forever. Today we know his idea as “Conversation of Momentum”. He was the first person to introduce the idea of vacuum even though at that time we had no idea that vacuum can exist or not.

               Then after many years Galileo comes into picture. He made certain rules to explain the motion of objects. He says that if you have a recipe(the law governing the motion), initial position of the object and initial velocity and if you add friction, air resistance and other things afterwards to this recipe, you’ll have a much accurate way of explaining the phenomena.  

               This was a fundamentally new way of explaining the things. It says that there is no mover moving the object but there are equations, conservation laws that explain the phenomena of motion.

A new era; A new Journey

               Newton comes up with the theory of motion explaining the motion of everyday objects, if we study them we can come up with something called the “Conservation of information.” Laplace said that suppose we have two billiard balls and we are given with the information about the starting position and velocity, by solving the Newton’s equation, we can predict the future of the billiard balls i.e. the position and velocity at any instance in future.

But that is not all, Laplace said that if you give me the information at any moment in time, we can not only determine the behavior of future but also determine the past. We can know what could have happened in the past i.e. “information is equally stored in every moment of its existence.”

With this idea, we can come up with say a Demon called Laplace’s Demon which has the information about the position and velocity of every single object in the universe and it knows the laws governing them and given with the capacity to do the calculation, it can determine everything. Then, there is no difference between past and future for the demon, both are equally transparent. There has been long going debates about determinism and free will, but only the language has changed.

The changing Language

The language has been changed in the sense, instead of talking in terms of cause and effect; we now talk in terms of patterns. Let’s take an example of the set of integers.

{…, -3 , -2 , -1 , 0 , 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ,..}

If we take a number say 4, we can tell that the number preceding is 5, because there is a pattern. We don’t say 4 is the cause of 5 and 5 is the effect of 4.

Laplace comes up with the idea of patterns, that the laws of governing everyday objects are just some patterns and differential equations. Even though we know all of this, we are yet to truly absorb the language of patterns.

We know that these things are not completely true because the things have came to a lot of change after the introduction of relativity and quantum mechanics, but the laws in the local domain is more or less the same. Even though we came up with a lot of changes in the fundamental or microscopic level, the things at the macroscopic level are more or less the same and it might be the same in future. We just have to adopt the new language of the laws governing the things.

To get familiar with more of such not so known physics theories; Click Here.